Classical India named four aims of life: wealth, pleasure, rightness, and mokṣa, release. The first three have their uses and their satiations; the fourth answers a different hunger altogether: the end of the wanderer’s sense of being trapped in a role.
What it is
The traditions differ instructively. For the Upaniṣadic tradition it is recognition, the self was never bound, only mis-taken. For the devotional traditions it is unbroken relation, love matured past separation. For the Buddhist traditions it is nirvāṇa, the fire’s going-out for want of fuel. What they share: mokṣa is available now, in this life, in principle.
The path question
Which practice reaches it, this is why the traditions keep their many paths (karma, gyan, bhakti), and why the Gītā ends by blessing all of them.
Related entries
- Dharma , The word that will not translate, that which holds things together; duty, law, order, rightness, and one's own particular place in all of it.
- Karma , Action and its consequence, the doctrine that nothing is wasted and nothing is exempt, working across lifetimes with impersonal precision.
- Upaniṣads , The forest dialogues at the end of the Vedas, philosophy as conversation, and the source of every "you are that" the tradition ever said.
Mentioned in
References
- The Upaniṣads (liberation as recognition, tat tvam asi)
- The Bhagavad Gītā (chapters 14–18, the gunas and the freed person)